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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#501

Post by guywithahat »

JohnFen wrote: post #487
solenoid0937 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between "have fun being poor" and the AI craze is that if you have a shred of initiative you can actually do incredible things with AI right now. The detractors are so bizarre to me. I think it's because I work at a big tech that has so thoroughly wired AI into everything we do, and the benefits are so undeniable and totally perspective changing, that it's like arguing with someone that thinks the sun…

I wasn't commenting on whether or not the tech is useful. I was commenting on how such a rhetorical approach is counterproductive and doesn't offer any sort on insight.

I guess I don't see how your comment is useful. If LLM's/AI are not generating code for your team, you need to update your processes. Telling someone they can't run faster than a car isn't evangelicalism of cars, and it wouldn't be counterproductive to tell someone who works at a shipping company they should be using vehicles to ship packages.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#503

Post by hparadiz »

deadbabe wrote: post #476
hparadiz wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say the same. I've been super hands on with a C project. Really getting into the details of the event bus and how to make things performant. The AI is still writing 99% of the code but I'm being super strict about what I consider acceptable.

And when you get memory leaks and don’t know how to debug?

Lol what a silly assumption

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#504

Post by naikrovek »

tdeck wrote: post #492
chatmasta wrote: post #103

What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine… All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve be…

> I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Would it be such a bad thing if the "right way" to build a JavaScript frontend didn't change so much every year?

let me take the comment you replied to and follow through a bit.

would it be such a bad thing if we moved away from JavaScript entirely?

If we commit to AI, that seems exceedingly unlikely to happen.

I mean do we really think that JavaScript is the best way to do this? I don't. I've been in IT and software development for 30 years. I thought I would see things progress, but I have not. Same operating systems, same browsers more or less still running JavaScript, same network stack, same everything. an immense amount of work to slowly evolve things that weren't designed to evolve for 30 years.

Thirty Years.

We all know that things around us are flawed and that there are better ways, but we do nothing about it. How many people are looking at new paradigms, new ways to do something? Three? Four? I bet it's within that order of magnitude. Come on.

I'm disappointed in everyone in this industry, including myself.

Look at Plan 9. It was different. It was flawed, but it tried to fix things, at least. It tried to do some sharp corners in Unix differently, and for the time I think it was good. At least they made an attempt. Linux took a few lessons from it, but I don't think anyone else did. Not really.

I'm mad. We have let ourselves down, we have let ourselves stagnate and simply spin wheels because using what's here is easier than designing something new and sharing it. Influential people don't look at new things often enough. People new to the field and young people don't understand what my complaint is about really, because this is all brand new, to them. They didn't witness the stagnation. I did. I am disappointed and I don't really know what to do about it.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#505

Post by eloisant »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #299
eloisant wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profil…

Sure, "it's handy" and once every few years you encounter a bug where ASM or C knowledge is valuable.

Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#506

Post by zombot »

I sure am bored of talking about AI. Always the same points pro and con being rehashed, it's so tiring. But what do you know, all this comment thread does is to continue talking about AI. We who are bored of it seem to be a tiny minority.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#507

Post by computerdork »

mostertoaster wrote: post #444
computerdork wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, it seems pretty clear that climate is getting hotter, so it seems natural for some people to be worried about what will happen to the planet in a few decades (me for one). And, you may be right, it may not be that big a deal and that we're being alarmists, but it seems like we currently have the tools to slow it down greatly. Why not be on the safe side and use them? ... but to be honest, guessing my opinion won…

It’s really about the cost/benefit analysis. The value of plowing ahead and using more energy is worth far more than making sure Florida doesn’t lose some coastline. The presumptions I see that annoy me with the alarmists, is that they completely negate human agency and ingenuity, and they ignore the economic cost of many of the proposed plans. Natural gas is far better than coal and should be encouraged rather than…

Agree that you need to balance costs with benefits, but nowadays, solar and wind are often the cheapest options (southern states or states with lots of wind). And nuclear is an option that even some staunch environmentalists support these days.

Yeah, don't think most people who support battling climate change are extremists. We just believe it's a big problem, and, to put it in monetary terms, having to deal with major changes in climate could cost the world tens of trillions of dollars by some scientist predictions. Yeah, it's like any problem, doing relatively small fixes now could save enormous amounts of time and money later down the line. Seems like it would probably good usage of our efforts.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#508

Post by runarberg »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #255
plagiarist wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is feudalism but with raw generational wealth instead of generational wealth with divine right characteristics.

I see some overlap, but I think it's more complex than that. If we conflate the two so easily they lose meaning. Certainly, some people have that experience under capitalism. I think there are systemic failures which lead to life experiences that are probably not all that different from some peoples' experiences in feudal society, both at the top and bottom of the hierarchy. The more I think about it though, I'm not…

I see your point, in fact I am against the term Neo-colonialism for this exact reason. Neo-colonialism is bad, but next to the horrors of actual colonialism, it is a walk in the park. And naming economic policies which artificially increases the dependency of a foreign country in your economy, after a policy of mass extraction, neglect, violence, and even genocide really removes the horrors from the latter.

However it has been over 500 years since feudalism. People today are still very much living with the consequences of colonialism, some people are in fact still living under colonial rule (notably in Western Sahara and Palestine). The consequences of feudalism have long passed. I think it is fine actually to conflate the horrors of capitalism with the horrors of feudalism. 500 years ought to be long enough.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#509

Post by mostertoaster »

computerdork wrote: post #507
mostertoaster wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really about the cost/benefit analysis. The value of plowing ahead and using more energy is worth far more than making sure Florida doesn’t lose some coastline. The presumptions I see that annoy me with the alarmists, is that they completely negate human agency and ingenuity, and they ignore the economic cost of many of the proposed plans. Natural gas is far better than coal and should be encouraged rather than…

Agree that you need to balance costs with benefits, but nowadays, solar and wind are often the cheapest options (southern states or states with lots of wind). And nuclear is an option that even some staunch environmentalists support these days. Yeah, don't think most people who support battling climate change are extremists. We just believe it's a big problem, and, to put it in monetary terms, having to deal with maj…

Yeah I’m all for doing what makes sense.

I probably just overreact and judge too quickly certain statements from my experiences of people who act like I’m destroying the earth because I have more than 3 kids.

I appreciate reasonable people though, and I should not assume, everyone is a crazy alarmist because they have any concern, so I apologize.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#510

Post by dogleash »

AbanoubRodolf wrote: post #389
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

[flagged]

>The identity crisis observation is the most accurate thing

It's also a nasty tool used to dismiss criticism by tearing people down in work-friendly language.

Software does employ a lot turds that it shouldn't. We been knowing this. Impossible to ignore following the 2010s push to expand the hiring pool. Newcomers didn't even pretend to try or care.

Convenient that we're suddenly calling them out now. At the same time there's a need to indiscriminately invalidate professional-informed opinions.

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